


Don't You Know That There (Ain't No Mountain High Enough)

by SylvanWitch



Series: Ain't No Mountain High Enough [12]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Dirty Talk, Honeymoon, M/M, Marathon Sex, Mutual Masturbation, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-14
Updated: 2018-01-14
Packaged: 2019-03-04 20:44:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13372731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Steve had regained consciousness often enough that it was coming to seem old hat to lie still and take in his surroundings without use of his eyes (don’t let them know you’re awake).Or, Tony gives Steve a kidnapping for their honeymoon.





	Don't You Know That There (Ain't No Mountain High Enough)

**Author's Note:**

> This series has been a source of great pleasure and a whole hell of a lot of fun for me, and I'm a little sad to have it come to an end. I'm grateful to everyone who has been so enthusiastic for and supportive of these two monumental goof-balls and the ongoing sexy sapfest that has been this series of fics. Your kudos and comments have been a constant source of encouragement and joy. Thank you all.
> 
> There is at least one curtain fic that I have planned as relates to this series, and I'm not one to say "never" about sequels. For now, I have other projects in mind, but that doesn't mean there may not be a surprise or two left for these guys.
> 
> Finally, as always, the title is taken from Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell's terrific "Ain't No Mountain High Enough."

Steve had regained consciousness often enough that it was coming to seem old hat to lie still and take in his surroundings without use of his eyes ( _don’t let them know you’re awake_ ).

 

He started with scent—evergreens, with an undercurrent of cold rock and maybe the vaguest sense of something man-made, something other than his deodorant, which he could clearly detect against the otherwise natural smell of the surrounding world. 

 

The air was cool on his bare hands and his face but not cold.  He was still wearing what he had been in when he’d left the Tower to run a few errands:  Jeans, long-sleeved Henley, boots.  He was in no immediate danger of freezing to death, at least.  Small miracles, etc.

 

There was a stinging sensation over his collarbone, and Steve knew without looking that it meant his subcutaneous tracker had been removed.  Again.

 

He could hear wind soughing through trees at some distance and, closer up, the annoyed chittering of a small mammal. 

 

What he couldn’t sense was the proximity of any other person, nor was he aware of any fetters, handcuffs, zip-ties, or magical bonds holding him in place.

 

Steve figured it was safe enough to open his eyes, so he did so, slowly and carefully, peering through slits before growing more confident of his position and opening them wide to take in a bare rock face surrounded by stunted evergreens, mountain wind, and a single pissed off red squirrel.

 

With a sigh, Steve got to his feet and dusted himself off, looking around more carefully before hazarding a guess at his location. 

 

“Middle of fucking nowhere,” he muttered to himself, Tony’s influence having had a profound impact on his vocabulary of late.  Since the wedding, they’d spent a lot of time in, uh, close contact, and a lot had rubbed off on him.

 

Steve swallowed around a sudden spike in arousal at the thought of what else Tony had rubbed off on him.  It had been a pretty spectacular seventy-two hours since they’d gotten hitched in front of the team at the Tower.  Taking in a jagged breath, Steve scrubbed a hand over his face and told himself to get a grip.  He’d been abducted, for fuck’s sake.  He needed to figure out where he was.

 

To the northwest, there was a narrow game trail that ran up the side of the mountain’s bare face in a more or less straight line.  Reasoning that higher ground would help him orient himself, Steve moved out up the trail, taking care to watch his step, wanting neither a precipitous plunge nor goat shit on his boots.

 

When he came to the narrowest place on the trail, where it turned around an out-thrusting of the mountain, Steve stopped, not because he was concerned about his footing but because he had a sudden, overwhelming sense of déjà vu.

 

He knew this trail.  He’d been here before.

 

Steve sucked in a long breath, trying to marshal his temper, and shook his head against the red rage that was raising blood thunder in his ears.  It would do no good to get pissed at Fury, who was probably nowhere near Steve at the moment, if he knew what was good for him.  And if he was watching, well, Steve wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of seeing his anger.

 

Moving more purposefully now that he knew what to expect, Steve continued his climb, negotiating the narrow ledge with ease and watching his feet, so that when he finally arrived at a broader stretch of trail and took a second to look up, he almost lost his footing despite himself.

 

Because instead of the impromptu shelter beneath a rocky overhang that he and Tony had used more than a year ago when they’d been stranded together here on this mountain, Steve saw a tent, palatial by Army standards but otherwise understated, mute digital grey camouflage doing its diligent best to blend in with the cliff behind it, and in front of the tent, legs spread and hands out as if he owned the whole fucking horizon, Tony Stark, grinning like a cat who’d been given free run of the canary house.

 

“Happy honeymoon!” Tony crowed, not at all cowed by the thunderous expression Steve knew he must be wearing.

 

Smoothing said expression out to a milder chagrin, Steve closed the distance between them and stopped within arm’s length of his husband.

 

“You couldn’t have just invited me for a hike?” Steve asked, thinking that he sounded mighty reasonable, given how he’d woken up a few minutes before.

 

“What sort of surprise would that have been?”

 

“The sort that didn’t require rendering me unconscious and cutting me open?”  His voice might have gone up a notch in volume there, but Steve felt he was still within the range of handling-this-very-well-thank-you.

 

“C’mon, you’ve had worse over breakfast,” Tony observed, which was…fair, actually, when Steve considered that only a week ago, Clint, in the middle of demonstrating a wrist flick using a butter knife, had caught Steve in the eye with a stray bit of toast.  Bruce had fared worse—orange marmalade was hard to get out of chest hair—and Clint had been banned from using real cutlery until further notice.

 

Still…

 

“Not the point.”

 

“The point is to render each other semi-conscious repeatedly without having to hear Nat complain about the noise we’re making,” Tony explained, giving Steve a look.

 

Oh.  Well…

 

“I can get behind that,” Steve said, dead-pan, and Tony chortled like an eleven-year-old boy discovering his sister’s lingerie catalogue for the first time.

 

Since that was totally the effect Steve was going for, he couldn’t maintain his constipated Boy Scout expression for very long, and when Tony turned to twitch his ass at Steve and give him a meaningful look over his shoulder, Steve broke, his laughter carrying on the still midday air.

 

Any resemblance the tent might have borne to US Army field housing ended just inside the door.  The floor of the tent was covered in a sumptuous, thick-piled rug in deep blue.  Straight ahead was an enormous metal brazier, complete with a chimney venting through a hole designed for that purpose in the top of the tent.  To the left inside the door was a small pine table and two chairs, place settings suggesting an intimate meal for two was in the cards.  To the right a mini-fridge hummed quietly, running off of a battery stored in a handsome faux-humidor housing.  A wet bar and dual-burner hot-top suggested further adventures in wining and dining.

 

But the piece de resistance was a California king mattress draped in lush blue velvet with deep red piping and white tassels and sporting an enormous A.  It dominated the back half of the room, sharing the space only with a night-stand on which were a variety of accoutrements, some of which Steve didn’t know the purpose of, and an alarmingly ambitious-sized bottle of personal lubricant of the sort Tony most preferred.

 

“So, whaddya think?” Tony asked after a few moments of stunned silence from Steve.

 

“It’s…” Steve shook his head, at a loss for words.  Abandoning the effort after a second false start, Steve covered the three steps between them, picked Tony up, and carried him bodily to the bed, where he dropped him in a sprawl across the bedspread.

 

“Hey, shoes off!” Tony warned, but his glare was missing any bite, since he was in the process of taking off his shirt when he said it.

 

By the time Steve had gotten his boots off by the door, Tony was down to his skivvies, which he left on, apparently to emphasize the line of his cock through the tight black fabric.

 

The line he stroked languidly, eyes lidded, as Steve crossed the tent back toward him, shedding Henley and jeans and socks as he came.

 

Over the three days since their wedding, they had had sex in a number of ways that Steve hadn’t considered before, in what he thought must be every permutation anatomically possible, even for someone as physically resilient as he was.

 

And he felt, not without a little earned vanity, that he had more than acquitted himself in the stamina department.  There were benefits to the super-soldier serum that Dr. Erskine either hadn’t foreseen or had chosen not to discuss with his squeaky-clean success story.

 

Anyway, Steve was feeling pretty smug when he hit the bed on his knees and moved to cover Tony with his body.

 

“Uh-uh,” Tony said, “Not that way.”

 

Steve paused on his knees, towering over Tony, who was still propped on one elbow, the other hand moving slowly and purposefully over his cock, still clothed in his briefs.

 

“You want me on my back?”

 

Tony shook his head.

 

“Hands and knees?”

 

Another negative.

 

“Side?”  They’d tried it once already, and Steve had found it a little off-putting like that, not enough depth and too much muscle strain, but he could get with whatever program Tony suggested if it meant they were getting on with the honeymoon festivities.

 

But Tony shook his head once more and Steve said, “What then?”

 

“Just like this,” Tony said, pausing in his upstroke to gesture with that hand at Steve on his knees over him.  “Like this,” he said again, resuming his pleasure with a firmer stroke, rubbing his thumb over the head where it pressed against the cotton, leaving a spreading dark stain there that wrung a little choked breath out of Steve.

 

He hadn’t thought he had a thing for watching.  In fact, he kind of thought he preferred being watched.  It felt somehow impolite to stare at someone else while he took his pleasure, even if it was the man he loved, even if Steve loved watching him take that pleasure.

 

But as it turned out, Steve hadn’t known this about himself.  He really, really liked watching Tony jacking himself off in sure, firm strokes over his clothed cock.

 

With a quick jut of his chin, Tony indicated that Steve should get with the program, and the moment he touched himself, he understood what Tony was feeling.

 

There was something filthy about doing it like this, like quick jack-offs under the sheets in the barracks, working himself through orgasm with his eyes squinched shut and ears wide open for any sound that might indicate the others heard him…or were doing the same.

 

Of course, back then, Steve had never thought about being watched, about _letting himself_ be watched.  Tony’s eyes were half-closed but fixed on Steve, moving deliberately, lasciviously, from Steve’s face to his hand and back again, _showing_ Steve that he was looking.

 

And Steve couldn’t help but watch Tony’s hand as it stroked, first slow and then faster, palming the head of his cock through his wet briefs, getting a little rough with it so that sound hissed between his teeth.

 

Steve copied Tony’s move, and that earned him a moan, and like a good little soldier he dropped into step with Tony, matching him in pace and in motion, gasping as Tony sped up and he felt it in his own cock, feeling the pressure building in his balls.

 

“Don’t you come, Boy Scout,” Tony commanded, but this was one order Steve couldn’t obey, the combination of Tony’s watchful eyes and frantic hand and the filthy sounds spilling from his bitten mouth driving him over the edge, his eyes squeezing shut of their own volition, thighs trembling and “Fuck, Tony, ohfuckohfuck” falling from his mouth.

 

By the time he had finished, Steve was curled over himself, panting and sweaty and utterly spent, and still Tony worked his own cock, relentless, his eyes hot on Steve, his mouth—that lewd, luscious red mouth—spewing gorgeously obscene suggestions for what Tony was going to do to and with Steve next.

 

If he’d had it in him, Steve might have come again, but there was nothing left of his legendary stamina, and when Tony finished with a shout that they must have heard at the Tower, half a world and a whole other lifetime away, Steve slumped onto his back on the mattress beside him, barely aware of Tony’s heavy breathing or his own accelerated heartrate.

 

When he woke up, it was darker in the tent, with a warm golden light from the brazier dancing with the shadows on the ceiling.  Steve sat up, rubbing his face, and saw that Tony was seated in a red robe and sleep pants at the table reading a book, his glasses down on the end of his nose in a way that Tony would never wear them when anyone was around to see.

 

Steve enjoyed the private moment for a span of breaths and then made a deliberate noise to alert Tony to his audience.  Even spouses deserved secrets, after all.

 

As Tony whipped his glasses off, he said, “So I think we should check with Doc Carmody when we get back home, make sure your formula doesn’t need tweaking.  ‘Cause frankly, I thought you could keep up for at least the first two rounds.”

 

“Sorry,” he said, giving Tony a sheepish look as he climbed out of bed and padded—naked, he noticed, so he’d even slept through Tony taking his briefs off—over to the table.  As he came, Tony drank him in, expression hungry and wanting.

 

Steve felt something squirm in his gut at the look, at the way Tony’s eyes seemed to strip him of another layer, to leave him utterly and completely vulnerable to whatever Tony might ask him to do.

 

He swallowed hard and willed the nervousness away.  This was Tony, his lover—his _husband_.  Steve had—demonstrably on a number of occasions—trusted Tony with his life.  Tony would never ask anything of him that Steve wasn’t willing and able to give.

“I’ll just—,” he said after a few seconds of quiet, indicating a midnight blue robe monogramed with a big red S over the pocket that was draped over the other chair. 

 

(Tony’s, he saw, also had an S over the pocket, for _Stark_ , presumably.  They’d already had the names conversation, and Tony had begrudgingly agreed that Steve Stark, while pleasingly alliterative, had no public cache.  Besides, they were trying to keep the arriedmay thing an ecretsay as long as they could, to borrow a phrase from Clint.)

 

But as Steve reached out to pick up the robe, Tony said, “Uh-uh-uh,” waving a finger like Steve’s fourth grade teacher and shaking his head, a moue of simulated disappointment on his saturnine face.

 

A gleam in his eyes told Steve that he wasn’t actually in trouble—or, at least, not the kind of trouble that Mrs. Bevins would have scolded him for.

 

Thinking of Mrs. Bevins put a different kind of squirm in his stomach. She was definitely not the person he wanted to be considering while naked.  The fact that she’d come to mind at all suggested just how nervous Steve was—the fourth grade had been rife with opportunities for personal humiliation.

 

He could tell himself all he wanted that Tony wasn’t out to humiliate him, but standing there completely vulnerable was hard for Steve, and not in the good way.

 

“You know,” Tony began conversationally, and Steve tensed.  “What I really want you to do is spread your legs a little more.”

 

Steve felt his cheeks heat and stammered, “Uh…”  He had to resist the urge to cover himself with his hands like some sort of blushing virgin, and he ruthlessly suppressed memories of middle school locker-rooms and how he had spent most of the eighth grade sweating up his good clothes because he had learned the hard way not to shower after gym class.

 

“Ste-eve,” Tony wheedled, and at last Steve did what he was asked, if only because he really didn’t want to explain to Tony how a guy who’d been in the Army all those years was deeply uncomfortable being naked in front of the guy who’d just spent three days having him in every way physically possible (and a few that would have been anatomically improbable if Steve weren’t a super soldier, not that he’d ever brag).

 

“Yeah, just a little.  The light there is juuuust right.”  Tony was staring with unabashed lust at Steve’s cock and balls.

 

“Do you know how gorgeous your cock is?” Again, Tony might have been making a commonplace remark except for the very intimate subject matter.

 

“Although your balls are pretty fantastic, too, heavy and round.  I love sucking you off and playing with them at the same time.”

 

The heat had reached Steve’s neck, and he knew that before long his chest would be red as well.  He wondered if the warm light in the tent would hide his reaction.

 

He loved Tony, and he loved pleasing Tony, and he was completely aware of two disparate thoughts pinballing around his head:  _I’m going to get spectacularly laid_ and _I really want to put on some pants_ —which were, admittedly, almost entirely mutually exclusive.  And he knew that only a few hours ago, Tony had watched him bring himself to orgasm while doing the same for himself. 

 

None of that changed the fact that being naked and on display like this and hearing Tony’s compliments about his body made Steve deeply and unexpectedly uncomfortable.

 

“Why don’t you touch yourself for me?” Tony suggested, turning his chair away from the table and crossing his legs, as if settling in to watch an audition.

 

Steve made a sound, half denial, half surrender, and Tony leaned forward a little in the chair, expression gentling.  “Please?” he said, and his tone asked Steve to trust him, which Steve did—of course he did.  He could tell Tony no right now, and this would stop.  Steve would put on the robe and sit down at the table, and they’d probably have something to eat and then make increasingly dirty innuendoes at each other until one of them led the other to bed.

 

Where they’d be totally naked with each other and doing all sorts of things that didn’t make Steve feel remotely uncomfortable (friction burn didn’t count).

 

So with a hesitant hand, Steve reached down to give his cock an experimental stroke.

 

His discomfort had been anything but arousing, so he was flaccid, and nothing at the moment was making him feel any hotter, but he fixed his eyes on Tony’s, which were watching the motion of his hand with undisguised avarice.

 

Steve sped up a little, experimentally, and Tony’s tongue did a slow stroll across his lush bottom lip.

 

 _That_ , Steve felt, a heaviness growing in his core and his cock jumping in his hand and then beginning to fill.

 

“I love it when you first start to feel it,” Tony said then.  He smoothed the robe over his thighs as though resisting the urge to touch himself.  “Your eyes half-close and you get this distant look, like you’re chasing the feeling. Yeah, like that.” 

 

Steve’s breath caught in his throat, his heartrate kicking up.  He was fully hard now, Tony’s every word apparently connected directly to his cock.  He widened his stance to hold himself up as the pleasure started pooling low in his belly. 

 

“When I reach for you, your cock jumps under my hand and your breath makes this shuddery sound…Do you know what it’s like to know that I do that to you?”  Tony uncrossed his legs, clearly restless for touch, but he didn’t move to stroke himself, only kept talking.

 

“Do you have any idea how gorgeous you are when you’re flushed and panting?  When the muscles of your shoulders cord up, I want to bite you till you scream, Steve.  I want to eat you alive.”  Tony’s voice dropped an octave on the last words, and Steve moaned and palmed the head of his cock.

 

“God, look at you,” Tony said, his voice gratifyingly hoarse.  It sent a wash of need through Steve, and he sped up in his stroking, any embarrassment a thing of distant memory.

 

Tony said, “Fuck, Steve, I want to run my tongue down your belly and put my mouth on you.  I love how you taste.  I love that sound you make when I lick your balls and the way you squirm every single time I put my tongue inside of you.”

 

“St-stop,” Steve begged, too close to the edge, knowing that if Tony kept talking he’d plunge over it, coming all over the rug.  “I need—”

 

“You need to come right now,” Tony said, his voice suddenly hard and commanding, and Steve did as he was told, coming in thick, ropy bursts, his knees going watery at the intensity of the sensation, as if Tony’s voice were drawing it out of him, because he was still talking—

 

“God, fuck, do you know what you look like right now?  How filthy and fucking gorgeous you look with jizz dripping from your fingers?  With your face and chest flushed red and your mouth open like you can’t wait for me to shove my cock inside of it?”

 

Steve dropped to his knees, covering the few feet to Tony’s chair like that, parting his fly with a shaking hand and wrapping his mouth around Tony and sucking hard, feeling Tony’s hand fisting his hair as Steve took what Tony was giving, swallowing the bitter hot spend, reveling in having reduced Tony to nonsense words and cursing.

 

When he finished, Steve slid off cleanly, putting a chaste kiss on Tony’s soft cock before hipping aside Tony’s knees to get close enough to lean in for a long, sloppy kiss.

 

They were both panting when Steve at last pulled away.  Tony’s cheeks were hectic red, his eyes half-closed, his lips a rough red ruin—he must have bitten them—and his cock was still hanging out of his fly, looking a little sad and lonely there.

 

Gently, Steve tucked it away, giving Tony an almost chaste kiss before finally getting to his feet and offering Tony his hand.

 

Tony raised an eyebrow as if that was all the expression he could manage, and Steve said, “The bed’s more comfortable for round three, don’t you think?”

 

Tony dropped his head back, groaning.  “I think you’re going to kill me.”

 

Steve shrugged. “Okay, but how do you want me to explain it to Nat when I call for a Quinjet evac?”  (Tony had let him in on the hidden emergency one-way signaling system he’d installed to let either of them contact Jarvis immediately if they had need.)

 

“Tell her you fucked me to death,” Tony said, getting to his feet with exaggerated slowness.

 

“I haven’t even begun to fuck you,” Steve promised, leaning in close to deliver that line directly into the delicate shell of Tony’s ear.

  
It was big talk of the sort Steve could ordinarily follow through on, but when they got to the bed, Tony was swaying on his feet, and Steve realized he was both ravenously hungry and actually kind of spent—what the hell had been in that knock-out dart, anyway?—so he postponed delivery of his promise in favor of stripping Tony with gentle efficiency and spooning up behind him in the big, soft bed, ignoring one appetite in favor of another, gentler one.

 

Covers over them, Tony a warm, breathing weight in his arms, Steve nuzzled Tony’s temple and kissed his cheekbone and the corner of his eye and said, “Sleep tight.”

 

Tony made an inarticulate sound and was asleep in seconds, Steve following him a minute or two later, chasing him down into dreams.

 

*****

 

Steve woke to birdsong and crisp mountain air.  The brazier had burned down to embers in the night, and it was cold in the tent.  There was enough grey light to navigate their scattered clothes, however, and once he found his jeans and shrugged into the robe he hadn’t gotten to put on the night before, he built up the fire from the wood basket near the door, shoved bare feet into his unlaced boots, and then wandered outside to see what he could see and take care of the usual morning needs.

 

In the process, he discovered that there was a portable shower unit complete with solar-powered water heater a few dozen feet beyond the tent and also a portable toilet and sink combo a hundred feet downwind of same.

 

It wasn’t the most discreet campsite if they were trying to keep themselves from being found, but it beat anything Steve had experienced in the Army for style and comfort.

 

Having done a brief perimeter sweep out of habit and an inescapable sense of the world falling apart if he didn’t, satisfied that there was no invading army waiting to fall upon them from a gaping hole in the sky, Steve went back inside to make coffee and see what he could do about breakfast.

 

Tony awoke a few minutes later, bleary-eyed and with an epic case of bedhead that made Steve smile.

 

Over toast and eggs and sausage and OJ and an entire pot of coffee—and god, Steve could get used to “camping” with Tony—they did the _Times_ crossword from the day before, Tony getting all the contemporary references and Steve kicking ass at the classics (Dean Martin, Claudette Colbert, Arky Vaughan).  They argued over six down and fifty-three across and made up in a greasy kiss that led, inevitably, back to bed.

 

The lovemaking this time was slow and easy, messy and familiar and intense in a way that Steve didn’t remember it being before.  They’d made love in a lot of circumstances:  when one or the other was hurt, when the world might be coming to an end, married and unmarried, afraid and enchanted, and once—just once, because the consequences to Tony’s workshop were catastrophic—when they were really pissed at each other, but this was something else.

 

Tony was damp and satisfied, dozing on Steve’s chest, Steve absently running his fingers over the ball of Tony’s shoulder, his other hand tucked behind his head, when it clicked into place, and he felt momentarily blinded by the revelation and then really, deeply dumb, because of course what had changed wasn’t their marital state or their sexual technique or Steve’s comfortability with being praised or Tony’s growing ease with Steve touching the arc reactor, even taking it out when Tony needed him to show that he could…

 

What had changed was deeper than issues of trust, deeper even than the fact of their love or their willingness to die for each other.

 

It was that they were, simply, a forever thing. 

 

Steve wasn’t sure he could articulate, even in his own head, never mind out loud, what exactly had shifted, but sometime between letting Tony talk him through an orgasm while he watched and sliding inside him with a hand across Tony’s chest and his mouth branding Tony’s neck with a love mark that even now roused something primitive and necessary in Steve, they’d become an absolute.

 

It wasn’t their license or the minister’s words or their friends’ witness or even their vows that made it so, either.  Only…

 

“Hey, Tone?”

 

“Mmm?” Tony murmured, fanning his fingers across Steve’s left pec to let him know he was listening.

 

“I think we’re forever.”  It was the best he could do; he had to hope that Tony got it.

 

Tony pushed up a little to look down at Steve, and then he closed his eyes for a while, and when he opened them again, there was an answering surety in his gaze.  He nodded.

 

“Yeah, that’s about right.”

 

“I mean, we said ‘forever’ before and meant it. But…”  He still didn’t have the words.

 

“This is more than that,” Tony agreed, not needing them.  

 

“Do you think—?”  But Steve stopped there, not wanting to ask the obvious next question, the one about mortality and serums and shrapnel and arc reactors.

 

“I think,” Tony said, pushing himself up and rolling to the side of the bed, “We should take a shower together—just to conserve hot water, of course—and then see if we can break the world record for consecutive orgasms on a mountaintop.”  He gave Steve a come-hither look over his bare shoulder.

 

“There is no such record,” Steve answered, but he got up, too, reaching for his robe and sliding into the scuffs that he just now noticed Tony had left for him on “his” side of the bed.

 

“Want to bet?”  Tony gave him a smile that could sell condoms to cloistered nuns.

 

Steve smiled back.  He couldn’t help it: he loved the guy.  “What do I get if I win?”

 

“Same thing as if you lose,” Tony promised. 

 

“Then what are we waiting for?”

 

*****

 

Much later, they’d be woken in the dark by the hum and rumble of a Quinjet setting down, but they didn’t bother getting out of bed.  Nat and Clint had the experience to know better than to enter unannounced, and anyone else deserved what they got if they barged in without first asking.

 

Even in as spacious and airy a tent as they currently occupied, the atmosphere was heady with sex—spend and sweat and trapped body heat, all the signifiers of a fabulously fantastic fucking time.

 

The typically implacable Nick Fury curled his nose in disgust before covering it with a gloved hand and saying, “Jesus Fuck, have you two even bothered to get dressed in the last three days?”

 

It was the kind of question that didn’t deserve an answer, so they looked back at him from the tangled nest of their well-used bed, Steve propped against the head-rail with his right arm around Tony, Tony sporting two-day stubble and Steve some truly spectacular beard-burn along his jaw and throat and around his nipples, which he hadn’t bothered covering.

 

In fact, they were barely decent, and Steve couldn’t find a single fuck in him to give.

 

Fury’s one good eye pretended to look regretful as he said, “You need to cut this short.”

 

Steve didn’t need to consult Tony for his answer:  “Fuck you.”

 

He felt Tony’s laugh against his own ribs:  “What he said.”

 

Fury sighed and held up both hands in a pushing motion, as if he could just put the problem away and get back to his regularly scheduled program of brooding and secret agency building.

 

“I’m not doing this again.” 

 

He looked mildly defeated, which Steve was sure was a put-on but even so made him feel a little guilty.  He was about to suggest a compromise when Tony said, “Forget it, Boy Scout,” sotto voce, and then, to Fury, “We’re not going anywhere.”

 

Fury’s defeat morphed into stiff-shouldered anger, and he opened his mouth to say something, only to be interrupted by an alarm claxon from the Quinjet.

 

“Your ride’s calling,” Tony said.  If it were possible for a voice to smirk, his was doing it in spades.  There was no doubt he’d done something to the Quinjet to cause that alarm.

 

“Stark—” Fury began, tone menacing.

 

Steve shifted a little, the bedclothes slithering down his abdomen, nearly exposing him.

 

“If I have to get out of this bed, you’re going to wish I hadn’t,” he said, and there was enough casual lethality in his tone to have made Nat proud.

 

“Fine.  But if the world ends and all your friends die, don’t come crying to me.”  The sentiment was somewhat softened by the amusement evident way back in Fury’s voice.

 

The tent flap hadn’t quite settled back into place when the sound of the Quinjet’s engines revving up alerted them to their imminent solitude.

 

He considered their accommodations and the warm body against him and the smell of their pleasure heavy in the air around him, and Steve Rogers smiled. 

 

“Well, at least we’ve got more than a toothpick and three pinecones this time,” he reflected, remembering the last time they’d driven Fury off of this mountain, leaving them alone once again.

 

“Yeah, this time there’s a mini-fridge,” Tony joked, but there was warmth and love and a million other things in his voice that told Steve he understood the things Steve wasn’t saying.

 

“Think we should go help them?”

 

Tony shrugged and said, “Nah, I gave Nat a way to get in touch with us if we were really needed.  Fury’s just grandstanding, as usual.  We’ve got more time.”

 

“Hell,” Steve answered, “We’ve got forever.”


End file.
